[Note: this video only just updated, so quality will improve over time.]

As I’ve mentioned previously, an unfortunate reality of the current Twitter Search tool is the distinct – and short – lifespan for Tweets. After a matter of a few weeks content ceases to appear in the search results, effectively wiping them from the face of existence.

In my mind this is an absolute travesty. An enormous wealth of information is freely shared every day and is worth preserving for posterity – not only from the standpoint of access to links and resources, but also analysis of trends over time.

Therefore one of the pet projects I’ve been indulging in over the last year or so, Tweets in Perpetuity looks at how best to archive Twitter posts so they are searchable and easily referenced later. A number of people have asked how the system actually works, so I wanted to take the time to document it.

The basic building blocks of the system are:

• WordPress – http://wordpress.org
• FeedWordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/
• P2 Theme – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

In the case of P2 and FeedWordPress, both of these elements can now be installed directly from the WordPress Dashboard area. Please see the WordPress Docs area for information on Installing Plugins and Adding Themes.

Finally, a major shout-out goes to Jim Groom, whose work with P2 at UMW Blogs inspired this whole idea and yet I failed to acknowledge in the video.

This tutorial introduces the basic Wikispaces navigation options and discusses how to use page histories and member edit histories to track contributions to the wiki over time.

This video was inspired by a question from a colleague. It demonstrates how to use Flickr to create dynamic image slideshows that can be embedded a variety of different websites and content management systems. Specific examples included here are WordPress and Blackboard, however the embed process can be used in any website that supports use of the embed code.

Please note, this clip has only just been uploaded and is still processing, so quality will improve over time.

I’ll update this post with additional details when time permits. In the meantime, the links to the components I used in this demonstration are:

• Google Docs – http://docs.google.com
• OPML Generator – http://unold.dk/code/opmlgen/
• Netvibes – http://netvibes.com
• Example – http://www.netvibes.com/mikebogle#Educational_Publications

If you have any feedback or questions please leave a comment.

This video was initially intended as a brief demonstration and update for a few people to help bring them up to speed on the R&D I’m currently engaged in, however it ended up comprehensive enough that I thought I’d share it here as well.

This clip is best viewed full screen with the HD setting selected. Press play to start the video, and then from the up arrow just beside the full screen button select 720p HD.

One of my many hats above and beyond that of educational technologist for UNSW is as pseudo-webmaster for the local homeschooling community that my family is a part of here in the Blue Mountains. As with most networks – educational or otherwise – we’ve had a need for a web presence to help organise our activities.

WordPress has been used to establish the first incarnation of the community website, and has been a very valuable tool to help facilitate things, however increasingly the logistics, planning and scope of the group activities and families involved has become more involved, thus necessitating a site redevelopment.

With this in mind I’ve begun to experiment with BuddyPress in earnest recently. BuddyPress adds a social layer to any WordPress installation, and opens the door to far more participatory elements than the base installation alone. This can include creation of groups, forums, file storage, messaging, and a wide variety of other activities.

When combined with the newly discovered and AWESOME Events Calendar plugin, this has helped establish (at least in principle) a formidable web presence that has been extremely easy to set up.

Given the potential use of this model to other online communities and/or educators, I thought it would be worth sharing what components have gone into this particular installation (as demonstrated in the above walkthrough).

So far this site incorporates the following plugins, all of them downloaded and installed from the WordPress Dashboard via the Add New Plugin option.

• WordPress 3.0
• BP Group Documents
• BP Group Management
• BuddyPress
• BuddyPress Announce Group
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription
• BuddyPress Restrict Group Creation
• Clean-Contact
• The Events Calendar

At this stage it’s unclear how much of this will comprise the final version of the site, however I’m impressed enough with BuddyPress’ power to want to share this information more widely.

Another offering of Facilitating Online is right around the corner and I wanted to take the opportunity to plug the course and exclaim my enthusiasm for the work that Sarah Stewart has been doing (are there other facilitators I should credit too Sarah?).

One of the reasons this course is so important is that it’s a holistic fusion of learning, education and technology.  Not only does it discuss use of online tools and methodologies in a very pedagogically sound sort of way, it moves beyond this to explore facilitation techniques, and how these differ between tools.

This distinction is a crucial one to consider I think, because one of the most common approaches to online learning and teaching is to try and replicate exactly what is done in the classroom, and I for one believe that’s a very ineffective way to approach the matter.

If we consider the classroom as a medium this is perhaps more easily discussed.

One of my favourite quotes by Michael Wesch relates to the idea that media is more than content and more than a means of communicating.  ”When media change, human relationships change.”

So looking at a move (either partly or completely) from a face-to-face setting to an online setting, this concept is very important.  The points of reference, opportunities, challenges and over all environment are all completely different online versus in the classroom.

As such, learning online is a very different experience than learning face to face. You can’t approach a curriculum in the same way – the facilitation of the experience is critical.

Facilitating Online 2010 is a wonderful opportunity to explore these concepts in a supportive setting, led by a wonderful facilitator and using a brilliantly designed wiki.

If you’re interested please see course wiki: http://wikieducator.org/Facilitating_Online/

Clearly the biggest news in the educational technology sector in the last 24 hours has been the announcement that Blackboard has acquired Elluminate and Wimba for $116 Million.

I already raised a big stink about this on Twitter yesterday and won’t do it again here; what I would like to do instead is add to the train of thought that George Siemens has expressed in his latest post: “Well Played, Blackboard.”

Essentially Siemens argues that Blackboard’s acquisition is a very logical business decision – and it is, but that’s the crux of the problem: it is a business decision.  For all parties involved, it’s a business decision; driven by financial interests on what’s best for the company, and the employees and shareholders of the company.

I can appreciate the need to keep a company profitable and running in the black and contributing to the morale and welfare of those who rely upon it as their source of economic welfare – but a healthy financial reality is not necessarily indicative of a healthy educational reality.

Indeed, I fiercely question how positive an outcome this can possibly be for the educational landscape, and fail to see how this acquisition can have anything but a negative impact on people’s learning experiences.

When we look at many of the acquisitions that have taken place in the tech sector over the years you discover a landscaped peppered with withering and dying services and applications, left fallow and neglected in the wake of the best business intentions.  See Jaiku, Delicious, Etherpad and Dodgeball for examples.

In Jaiku we saw a very healthy alternative to Twitter, whose acquisition by Google was seen as another very logical business decision that would provide it with access to the search engine giant’s deep pockets and influence. Unfortunately Jaiku was left in limbo with out any visible support and was eventually shelved as a project.

Dodgeball is another unfortunate example of services discontinued by Google after their acquisition.

Social Bookmarking Tool Delicious’ acquisition by Yahoo! is another example.  Once again, this was seen as a very logical business decision that would put Delicious in a more strategic decision to enhance it’s toolsuite and leverage Yahoo!’s influence.  Unfortunately this culmonated in founder Joshua Schachter leaving the company after the merger, declaring “I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.”

Etherpad is perhaps the most brutal example of them all.  This application had an enormous amount of potential as an collaborative online text editor – arguably the likes of which the web had ever seen before.  It’s adoption was beginning to skyrocket and it’s notoriety and recognised significance gaining steam by the day.

Then it was acquired by Google and promptly shelved.  After a great deal of outcry from the community about the decision, they later released the code as open source – however it was a bitter outcome that clearly demonstrated what happens to good services when logical business decisions take priority.

My point here is just because small companies and niche services are acquired by larger companies doesn’t guarantee service stability, predictability – or indeed even their long-term existence.  All too frequently we see start-ups subsumed and changed by a new corporate culture whose priorities lay elsewhere.  Unfortunately this frequently results in a far different reality for educators and users than had existed previously.

The fact that Blackboard has acquired the perhaps most widely-used synchronous educational collaboration suites may make sense for corporate stockholders, but educators should be petrified.

Following on yesterday’s experiment regarding “Google Wave for Decentralising Group Discussions” I’ve just noticed that the post has been syndicated elsewhere in its entirety.  A blog known has Watching the Watchers has picked up the post and republished it on their site.

This is really neat to see for a couple of reasons.

First of all it’s an example of sharing and reuse in action.  I release all of my contributions to this blog as Creative Commons Attribution licenses, meaning anyone can copy the work, adapt it and republish it so long as they attribute the source, which Watching the Watchers has clearly done.

The fact someone thought enough of the post to reproduce it is quite a compliment, and it’s great to see the practical application of openness in publishing.

The second significant aspect of this is the replication of the Wave itself.  The whole idea was to explore the idea that Wave could be used to distribute centralised discussions in decentralised spaces – namely, many people engaging in a shared discussion in different locations.

The fact Watching the Watchers has included the original Wave in their version of my post lets us examine how this idea would work in actual practice.  All of the comments in the wave have been reproduced, as will any future contributions to the discussion.

Effectively it doesn’t matter if someone looks at the wave on this blog, on Watching the Watchers, or in Google Wave itself – the contents of the discussion are one and the same regardless.

So thank you to Watching the Watchers for not only helping demonstrate re-use, but also establish a proof of concept in use of Wave to distribute discussions.

When Google Wave first launched some time ago it was met with an enormous hurrah of amazingness from many people in the tech community. Unfortunately the “game changing” realities of what Wave was supposedly going to evoke hasn’t eventuated, however that hasn’t stopped me from checking in on the application from time to time to see how the development is going.

Now that the hysteria has died down I’m finding it a bit easier to look at the tool in a more objective sort of way, and this morning I in fact had an idea about a real use for it in an educational context.

The significance of embedded content

One of the glaring voids in the tool historically has been there was no embed option. So you had to go into Wave in order to edit anything, or contribute to any discussions. For me the fact there are so many other communication tools out there meant that Wave was largely forgotten and overlooked.

However this morning I’ve just noticed they’ve added in an embed option, which means you can include a real-time view of the wave discussion in any website or blog that allows use of the embed code. The fact it contains JavaScript is a bit unfortunate though, since many websites are likely to lock down use of these sorts of code snippets (I suspect WordPress.com is one of them).

Decentralising Centralised Discussion

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wave would facilitate centralised discussions in a decentralised fashion.

One of the corner stones of many online courses is use of a discussion forum. The centralised nature of this tool is such that people can engage with one another to discuss and debate concepts and topics in a shared space.

Historically this has required use of a centralised tool like a group or learning management system, which effectively makes the online element course-centric as opposed to learner-centric. My thought was that Wave could mitigate this reality by allowing centralised discussions to be situated in many different locations all at the same time – including student blogs, learning management systems, groups, etcetera.

Students would then have the power to engage in the discussions in their own chosen contexts, while not losing out on valuable interaction with their peers and instructors.

An Example

For instance, below is a publicly visible wave I’ve created. Why not try entering a comment, and see if you can embed the snippet in your own context – if only temporarily. Largely this idea is untested, so I’d appreciate any collaboration or feedback people have on how well this idea works in practice.

Note, in order to make this Wave publicly visible and editably I’ve had to add public@a.gwave.com to the list of Wave participants. More on this here.

Update: After experimenting with this a bit it appears that the embed code snippet is only available from within Wave, rather than via the embedded instance. So students would theoretically need to visit Wave in the first to grab the snippet, and thereafter could enter comments through instances. It also appears that many of the options in the tool bar within Wave are unavailable outside of it.

google.load("wave", "1"); google.setOnLoadCallback(function() { new google.wave.WavePanel({target: document.getElementById("waveframe")}).loadWave("googlewave.com!w+oi8GWNXCA");});

"man is the only animal" by aaron yendall http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron-yendall/4606743415/

In speaking with Gina Minks this afternoon about a WordPress issue she was having, I’ve been brought to realise how much I’ve actually learned about technology over the years by virtue of completely destroying it.

You see, I have no technical background or formal training in IT.  I majored in Economics at university, and the only technical courses I took related to use of basic tasks like using Word and Excel.  Certainly nothing related to debugging WordPress or ham-fistedly interpreting PHP code.  Most everything I know I’ve learned through open-ended experimentation and frequently blowing things up.

This is one reason why I see so much importance in the notion of play and experimentation.  I’ve found the best ways of learning how something works is to discover how NOT to set it up; how NOT to fix it; changing the settings you must never, ever change; and pushing the buttons that you must not push under any circumstances.

For me, when something explodes, it’s a learning experience.  I may not know why I’ve reduced yet another installation to a smoking, smoldering crater, but I know not to do it that way again next time.  Over time, these experiences start to piece together to point me in the direction you ARE supposed to go, and the ways you’re SUPPOSED to configure things.

It requires a certain mindset to do things this way though, there’s no doubt about that.  You need to expect that failures will occur; that you’ll overwrite files or lose data.  It’s all part and parcel to the experience.  But at the end of the day the failures and technical corpses do as much – if not more – to educate us on how things work than doing them perfectly the first time.

At least that’s been my experience.

Traditionally I’ve just blogged here.  Yes, I’ve had the obligatory About Page with some basic information in it, but that’s hardly putting WordPress to it’s best use.

In continuing to ponder the topic of this blog’s evolution, I’ve decided to start to leverage this space as a content management system far more than I ever have before.  So I’ve begun to collate some of the work I’ve done elsewhere on the web into more of a hub using a series of sections, pages and sub-pages.

If you look at the menu structure, you’ll now see a few new headings.  Most notably these include two of the workshops I’ve facilitated this session on blogs and wikis.

The workshops that inspired this content have already taken place, however I’m keen to offer more of them in the future and will more than likely incorporate a similar model next time.  I also wanted to share what I’ve been up to with other people in case anyone finds a use for the material or resources.

As always, the content is shared under a Creative Commons License, so if you have a use for it feel free to appropriate whatever you need.

I’m also attempting to demonstrate how WordPress can be used as much more than your typical blog.  The blogging element is really valuable; don’t get me wrong.  But the power in WordPress is actually realised when you look beyond the blog.

Just to bring my train of thought to a close, after a great deal of thought and at times agonising frustration about how to contort some of my wacky ideas on learning into an institutional context I’ve decided to stop trying to cram square pegs into round holes.

For whatever reason, some ideas just don’t go together; and I think it’s time to stop trying to force them to.  So rather than rant and whinge about how certain models or ideas don’t fit, I’m just going to explore the models on their own merit – talk about what they are, how they work, and how you could implement them.

And if they won’t work in an institutionalised context so be it – it will just highlight how inflexible and unaccommodating the system is.  Learning is bigger than schooling and educating, and it’s silly to constraint potentially good ideas to suit a single system.

Game on.

Click on the image to visit the group on Flickr

On a much less controversial note, I wanted to take a minute to publicise the Educators on Flickr group that Anne Marie Cunningham has created.

Despite having used Flickr to host my images for quite a while now I have virtually no experience in using the site for more social purposes such as groups and discussions.  So this is fairly new territory for me.

Discussions are underway about different ways we could leverage the group, including experimentations with mash-ups and more advanced forms of re-use, theme activities, use of images as metaphors for learning, and other visually stimulating sorts of things.  So if you’re interested in experimenting yourself please drop by and join the group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/educators/

In reading Jim Groom’s post “It’s every bastard for himself, the last century hasn’t ended yet” and Leigh Blackall’s subsequent statement on Twitter that “…we have a serious fight on our hands” my current pessimism about education has taken on a new light.

I encourage you to read Jim’s post, because I won’t do it justice by paraphrasing it here.  The theme of the post seems to be that the nature of what “edupunk” is – e.g. the true meaning and purpose beyond the meme – has been hijacked by superficial self-serving interests amongst PR campaigns and marketing people and there is an acute need for debate and action by teachers and professors.

Yet in my current pessimistic state, I fail to see how any lasting change can truly take place within a system that is so fundamentally broken and in conflict with itself.  It seems to me that the only lasting change that can occur in learning is to abandon all existing systems and start over again – burn the bridges and the boats.

There are just too many bickering chefs in education, lost in their own agendas – too many power players, too many administrators, bureaucrats, politicians and other self-serving leeches that change is always undone.  Undone in the same way that two-party political systems like Labor and Liberal or Democrats and Republicans always undo each other.

Education needs a Third Party.  No, I take that back.  Education needs more than a Third Party because third parties are subject to the same broken systems as the main parties.  Education needs a new system with a rediscovered soul, because the soul of the current system has become irrevocably corrupted.

I’ve hit another acute blogging drought the last few weeks, inspired largely by disillusionment about formal education and what I see as an acute, irreconcilable conflict between the way I perceive learning – and the importance of freedom and flexibility – versus the demands of the administrative and bureaucratic systems that manage and influence what is seen as “formal” schooling.

School-requirements and policy in my view are far more concerned with reporting and administration than the facilitation of real learning. This is not to say that schools aren’t focused on or concerned with learning, but rather the way they approach it is inherently disempowering and centralising – which is the antithesis of my perspective.

The point here is most of the ideas I have about innovative or exciting ways to learn online are largely impossible or prohibitive when placed inside the context of formal ed.  I also find that there is a relative absence of interest in new models locally, which makes it feel as though I’d be screaming in a vacuum.

My instigator side tells me “well this means it’s time to rally against the system” and largely it is, but I’m low on mental energy at the moment and feeling quite discouraged.  So let’s hold that thought for the moment and come back to it when I’m feeling more feisty.

As far as this blog is concerned, I don’t want to see what I write about devolve into a stream of whinging about the establishment and how it’s done students wrong.  So until my optimism about how to seek and support free learning within constraining educational systems returns I need to identify other topics and themes to talk about.

So I’m contemplating what to do here and what to write about.  I’ve found in the past that merely stating out loud that I’m having trouble finding my Muse helps me rediscover it, but in lieu of that I’m also contemplating a thematic shift (or something) here.

Any ideas or suggestions are wholeheartedly welcome.

Perhaps I’ve woken up grumpy this morning, but this article by the Sydney Morning Herald (“Obama internet ‘kill switch’ proposed“) has seriously riled me up.  Apparently chairman of the US Homeland Security committee, Senator Joe Lieberman, has proposed giving the US President the sole power to unplug the internet.

“The proposed legislation, introduced into the US Senate by independent senator Joe Lieberman, who is chairman of the US Homeland Security committee, seeks to grant the President broad emergency powers over the internet in times of national emergency.”

I’ve yet to read into the proposed legislation, so I have only the Herald’s account to go off of; and yet I can’t help but be both appalled and disgusted by this.

This sort of unilateralism is something I would have expected from the Bush Administration, not from Obama.  In my view the Internet is a public good – an International Public Good – and as such it must not be managed or controlled by a single country alone.

As the Herald points out, the Internet now provides the basis for some critical functions, including finances, and up to the minute notifications for the general public on important issues.  It is, among other things, a way that The People, can mobilise to help themselves.

There is no word in the article regarding any discussions on this legislation between Lieberman and other countries.  I’m in two minds about whether that is appropriate really, since it hasn’t been passed by the Senate yet.

On the other hand, how a piece of legislation like this – which carries implications for billions of people in countless nations – can be proposed without consultation of the International community, is gravely concerning to me.

Protecting National Security is a critical function of government, yet government’s must also be conscious of the role that their countries have on the international stage – the idea that all nations have neighbors, and their actions affect the lives of other people.  To operate as though our actions have no consequences – or worse still, that these consequences are less significant than internal affairs – smacks of the ultimate arrogance.

I’m in a quandary at the moment that I need to think through.

Planting my ideological flag

A month or so ago I unapologetically revealed my Top 3 Tech Hate List on Twitter – Facebook, Blackboard and Apple. The ranking of these companies is frequently subject to change – but all of them in one form or another, at least in my view, place corporate interests over those of the user community.

• Blackboard is designed to exert strict control over when, how and in what form people learn, with most resulting content tied to the learning management system.
• Facebook has notoriously tyrannical user administration policies; equally strict prohibitions on pulling your own content from the system; and a very liberal approach to privacy and what is done with user data.
• Apple advocates DRM; subjects iTunes apps and content to a set of criteria that complies with their corporate interests and subject matter ideologies; and pursues perceived trademark infringers with a fundamentalist zeal of self-righteousness.

I recently deleted my Facebook account; am constantly at odds with myself over my relationship with Blackboard; and have a personal moratorium on purchasing of any Apple product. For me, these ideologies are far more important than any functional benefit or opportunity these three companies could offer.

Pedagogy First

However I also firmly believe that my role at UNSW is more significant than my opinions. This is ultimately what has led me to justify assisting the faculty with use of Blackboard. I see it as my responsibility to point out alternatives and other ways of working, however if people are interested in leveraging the LMS to assist in the learning process it is my role to help support that.

Concerns about Apple

It’s Apple that has me in conflict at the moment. The emergence of the iPad has seen an explosion of interest from the educational community – both positive and negative. Many people see it as a tremendous opportunity for mobile learning and tout it as “revolutionizing,” while others, such as myself, see it as a potentially powerful idea soured by corporate interests and another example of Apple trying to control and dictate our experiences with technology – and arguably the information we have access to.

In that sense I see an inherent danger in the close relationship that my university has begun to cultivate with Apple. iPhones are being afforded more recognition as mobile phones than other providers, both in terms of available support and considerations for web site optimisation; iPods are the assumed standard for portable media players to the extent the two phrases are used synonymously; we have also become an “iTunes university,” with a large proportion of media downloads expected to go through iTunes rather than other software. This all gives me a very uneasy feeling.

Contempt prior to investigation

On a personal level I continue to have no interest in the iPad and perhaps reactionarily unfollowed anyone who proclaimed the device “game changing” on Twitter in the days following its release. How anyone can see an immediate need for something they haven’t even touched, let alone used is still beyond me.

And yet, in many ways I am guilty of contempt prior to investigation. There may be real, tangible learning opportunities in the iPad that I am overlooking because of my passionate hatred of the company. As with Blackboard, I am beginning to think I need to look past this bias in favour of an objective evaluation on behalf of the faculty.

And yet this idea is a bitter and tough pill to swallow. I fail to see how open education and diversity of information can truly flourish in an environment based on locked down, filtered systems. Surely educational solutions should be easily transferred and transferrable between systems and circumstances, rather than restricted to or dictated by technologies or companies?

Then again, how can I make an informed decision or recommendation without having experimented with all the available options – open or locked down?

What do you think?

For a background on this poll please see ZDNet’s original article:

“Govt wants ISPs to record browsing history.”

If you have trouble viewing or submitting the form below please click here to go directly to the poll on Twtpoll.com – http://twtpoll.com/765k0y.

Several academic papers have caught my eye this week on educational technology, and I’ve begun to see some areas of similarity that are worth contemplating.

Specifically these are:

• Lane, Lisa. “Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching.”
• Kumar, Swapna. “The Net Generation’s Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies“
• Perez, Jorge; Coffin Murray, Meg. “Generativity: The New Frontier for Information and Communication Technology Literacy“

Perez and Murray on Generativity

Perez and Murray discuss the need for ICT literacy and spend a great deal of time exploring just what this “literacy” should look like based on previous definitions.

Ultimately they propose a model in which “skills and knowledge, along with attitudes toward IT, coalesce in the context of reflective self-awareness and purposeful intent to allow a computer user to achieve generativity – the ability to generate new skills and knowledge that form the basis for creativity.”

The notion of just what “generativity” is still eludes me quite a bit and I need to read up on this further.  The main point I make here on is their emphasis on the importance of skills, knowledge and attitudes in the development of literacies.

Frequently, they argue, ICT programs focus on the development of knowledge and skills alone – rather than a more holistic consideration that also includes attitudes towards ICT.

The authors relate each term back to Bloom’s taxonomy and define them as follows:

• knowledge -”represents understanding, comprehension, and purposeful intent.”
• skills - “the ability to perform a task or function”
• attitude - “learned tendencies that incorporate affective and behavioral dimensions”

Perez and Murray argue that attitude is an important precursors to behavior” that impacts the motivation to learn about and use computers.

Kumar on The Net Generation’s Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies

Kumar’s article is valuable because it examines real world cases in higher education.  When reading the article along side Perez and Murray I think this has important implications.

The paper explores the nature of how young people are using new technologies, in what way, and how they perceive the use and integration of technology in an educational context. Kumar indicates that, while use of technology is quite common amongst young people there is also a great deal of “technological diversity.”

As such, Kumar argues “we cannot assume that being a member of the ‘Net Generation’ is synonymous with knowing how to employ technology based tools strategically to optimize learning experiences in university settings.” In the context of Perez and Murray this would seem to suggest that many young people have the skills to use new technologies, but not the experience of applying them to learning with “purposeful intent.”

Further, Kumar cites several studies that found, while many students are familiar and proficient in the use of new technologies, this does not necessarily translate to a need for use of ICT in education:

“A few studies did attempt to gauge students’ preferences for the use of technologies in instruction. In the ECAR 2004 study, 31% of students (n=4374) preferred ‘extensive’ use of technology in the classroom, but only 13% of students reported that the use of technology in the classroom had improved their learning. Comparatively, in the ECAR 2008 study (n=27,168), although students were very comfortable with basic technology use, only 21.4% preferred ‘extensive’ use of IT in the classroom and 59.3% preferred ‘moderate’ use, with more males than females preferring IT use. The percentage of students who agreed that the use of technology in their courses improved their learning rose to 45.7% (Salaway et al., 2008). Students’ own skills as well as their prior experiences of technology use for learning influenced their responses but students’ high levels of technology use did not always result in their preferring the use of technology for educational purposes (Kvavik, 2005). The authors concluded that undergraduates have “a wide range of preferences, uses, skills, and opinions about IT in the academic context. And many of these views and practices change quickly over time” (Salaway et al., 2008, p. 11).”

In the context of Perez and Murray, these results would seem to relate back to the notion of attitude, and the impact it has on “affective and behavioral dimensions.”

This is not to say, however, that there is no value in the use of technologies in the classroom – quite the contrary in fact, the author’s research discovered that many students found the introduction of technologies very useful to the learning experience.  These included online video, blogs, wikis, discussion forums and Google Docs.

What this does suggest, though, is that there is a process in which students come to realise value and relevance of technology in learning, which has not necessarily been experienced by the individual.

“The findings of this pilot survey, along with the research reviewed, indicate that undergraduates’ application of new technologies for academic purposes can be likened to the five stages of technology adoption – Awareness, Adoption, Adaption, Appropriation, and Invention – reported in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow research (Dwyer, Ringstaff, & Sandholz, 1990). “

Importantly, Kumar hypothesizes that student perspectives on use of technology in education are – or may be – influenced greatly by how they see it used by instructors, saying “If students have had little exposure to the use of new technologies for teaching and learning, they cannot be blamed for not using such technologies for educational purposes.”

Lane on Insidious Pedagogy

Kumar’s argument appears supported by Lisa Lane’s article on “Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching.”  Lane discusses how the combination of “in-built pedagogy” in content management systems, and a lack of technical proficiency amongst instructors (referred to in the paper as “novice web-users”) frequently results in relatively superficial use of learning management systems.

If students come to university lacking the knowledge of how to meaningfully apply technology to support their learning, and are instructed by staff who are novices in use of online tools – or do not use them at all – the impact that technologies have on the learning experience is likely to be severely undermined or diluted – if not adversely affect the learning experience.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that an instructor who is a novice web-user will automatically produce students who are incapable of making meaningful use of technology.  For instance, Kumar indicated that some students self-initiated use of technologies during group work – sometimes without the instructors knowledge.

The point is, without proper modelling of use of technology the broader context of learning, the attitude’s of both students and teachers alike towards use of technology to support learning are likely to remain undeveloped.

Amidst a flurry of noise that includes children’s programing, screaming and laughing, toys, toys and more toys I am attempting to meaninfully read through this weeks CritLit2010 articles and papers – starting with Alec Fisher’s “Critical Thinking: An Introduction.”

I’m only just starting the article, but the author suggests that readers write down an explanation of what critical thinking means to them in order to establish a point of comparison to carry through the rest of the article.

So despite the barrage of stimulation around me and my current Saturday-morning sleepiness  - here are my thoughts on critical thinking.

To me critical thinking boils down to the constant use of analysis, logic, pre-existing experience, and an element of skepticism in observing and interpreting the facts and information we are exposed to.

It involves examining how new information relates or compares to our own experiences and other information we are already familiar with, whether it is consistent with other ideas, or in dispute of them and the basis upon which the arguments are being made.

Importantly it also looks closely at the logic or arguments that frame the information.  Are these statements clearly supported by existing information or do they seem baseless?  Can the sources be validated, and are they in fact based on solid logic themselves.

But it also relates to our experiences.  Do statements resonate with what we have experienced previously, or are they in direct opposition to this?  This does not suggest that we are or need to be experts in everything we see or read – rather that our experiences area valuable source of information in their own right and can therefore provide some insight into the implications of the new information.

Critical thinking is a tool or skill for filtering accurate information from inaccurate information, assessing its validity and the strength of its logic, interpreting its meaning, and ultimately beginning to make sense of the implications that it has for us and the world around us.

Update: Having now read most of the article it’s clear that my explanation of critical thinking is far too narrow, and more focussed on vetting the accuracy of a statement or proposition.

Fisher’s article portrays critical thinking of a far more encompassing activity that is as much about logical, considered decision making as it is about interpretation of fact and information – though the latter is included in this idea as well.

As a uni professor used to say “When you know what to think you’ll know how to act.”  Critical thinking appears to be the set of systematic processes that help us come to logical, well-considered conclusions, and then continue to assess their effectiveness.